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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Clegg fires welcome warning shot over regional pay

When the history of David Cameron’s government comes to be
written, the Budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne on 21 March may well
be seen as a decisive turning point in its fortunes

Whether it was the pasty tax, the granny tax, the tax on
charitable giving or the abolition of the 50p rate, those looking for something
to criticise in the Chancellor’s package found plenty of things to choose from.

But of all the measures announced by Mr Osborne two months
ago, surely the most pernicious as far as the North-East is concerned was the
proposal to introduce regional pay rates – paying teachers and other public
sector staff in Newcastle less than people doing the same jobs in London.

Far from seeing the prosperity gap between richer and poorer
regions as an evil which needs to be addressed, the idea of regional pay takes
such inequality as an incontrovertible fact of life and then threatens to
institutionalise it throughout the entire British economy.

Despite the efforts of some North-East MPs and union
leaders, the proposal has received little national attention up until now,
demonstrating once again the London-centricity of our national media.

But that may be about to change. For the question of regional pay now appears
to be playing into the much wider political narrative concerning the longer-term
future of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition.

In what can only be seen as a shot across Mr Osborne’s bows,
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg warned this week that his party could not sign up to
a policy that would exacerbate the North-South divide.

It seems that regional pay has now joined the growing list
of issues, alongside Europe, House of Lords reform and Rupert Murdoch, where
the two parts of the Coalition are singing from increasingly varying hymn sheets.

Speaking to the National Education Trust in London Mr Clegg
said: “Nothing has been decided and I feel very, very strongly as an MP in
South Yorkshire, with a lot of people in public services, we are not going to
be able simply willy-nilly to exacerbate a North-South divide.

“I think people
should be reassured we are not going to rush headlong in imposing a system from
above which if it was done in the way sometimes described would be totally
unjust because it would penalise some of the people working in some of the most
difficult areas.”

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of Monday’s speech was
simply hearing a senior minister – the Deputy Prime Minister no less – talking
about the North-South divide again.

It became practically a banned subject under Tony Blair, who
first attempted to dismiss it as a "myth,” then tried to con the region
into thinking something was being done about it by inventing a spurious target
to narrow the gap between the three richest regions and the six poorest.

In one sense, Mr Clegg’s intervention is not unexpected
given his own status as a South Yorkshire MP in what is a genuinely three-way
marginal constituency.

Mr Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has stated that
Mr Clegg's only hope of retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat at the next
election is to join the Conservative Party, and even making allowances for
Alastair’s obvious partisanship, I’ve a sneaking suspicion he may be right,

But in the meantime, it is clearly in the Lib Dem leader's
interests to try to put some clear yellow water between himself and the Tories
on issues with a particular relevance to the Northern regions.

In view of the Lib Dems’ dismal performance in local
elections in the North since the party joined the Coalition in 2010, it is
surely not a moment too soon.

Mr Blair’s indifference to the whole issue of regional
disparities was partly responsible for the Lib Dems’ dramatic surge in support
in the region between 1999 and 2007, with Labour-held seats like Newcastle
Central, Blaydon and Durham City briefly becoming realistic targets.

Meanwhile at local government level, the party took control
of Newcastle from Labour, and actually managed to hang on to it for seven years
before being swept away in the post-Coalition backwash of May 2011.

It will be a long way back for the party to reach those
giddy heights again, still further if it is to mount a serious challenge for
additional parliamentary seats in the region.

This week, however, Mr Clegg might just have taken the first
step along the road.

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

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Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

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